Lack of parity for women — behind the camera, in the front office, on the payroll — long has been one of Hollywood’s most intractable obstacles. Year after year, new studies reveal the same dreary landscape, with statistics vastly outnumbering solutions and attempts to address the issue scattershot at best. Shortly after becoming president of the non-profit Women in Film in 2011, producer Cathy Schulman was struck anew by this stagnation. “I was standing up in front of a group of people doing yet another speech about the lack of parity in Hollywood, and I felt, ‘How could I possibly be running an organization like Women in Film and repeating statistics that have essentially been flatlined since 1998?’ ”

She reached out to her good friend Keri Putnam, executive director of the Sundance Institute, and their organizations launched the Female Filmmakers Initiative. What began as a research project now has transformed into a movement among a supergroup of Hollywood insiders who are poised to lead concrete, lasting change. …